Problems with repartitioning a HP Pavilion Laptop

[Bill Stanley]

< snip >

>>
>> That sounds good to me.  One small point.  Since I boot to a  USB flash
>> drive, do I have to specify the haard drive (/dev/sda) and not the USB flash
>> drive?  If so, how should the command be modified?
>
> It depends on your system, I think - some machines will call the boot
> drive /dev/sda so if you're booting off USB it might be sda and the
> hard disk sdb. However, in my experience, this is rare, and using
> GParted you'll be able to see which disk is which readily.
>

Thanks for all the good information.  I'll let you know how it goes in a 
day or two.  (Windows installation is such a time consuming pain.)


As for your discussion about the location of swap space.  You are 
probably right when only one HD is involved.  Where there are two HD's, 
I found that the computer was significantly faster when the swap space 
was located on one HD and the data files and Operating system were 
located on the other HD.  The thinking went as follows...

With the swap space, data and OS located on the same HD, the read/write 
heads have to move from where the data & OS  are located to where the 
swap area is.  With the swap space located on the other HD the 
read/write heads on the primary HD stay over the data or OS.  The r/w 
heads on the secondary HD stay over the swap area.  With modern 
computers, with plenty of RAM, there is not much swapping so this effect 
is probably negligible.

Bill Stanley